Exploding black holes rain down on Earth

ARE mini black holes raining down through the Earth's atmosphere? It's possible, says a team of physicists. They think this could explain mysterious observations from mountain-top experiments over the past 30 years.

Ordinary black holes form when stars explode at the end of their lives. The heavy stellar core can collapse into a superdense "singularity" whose gravity is so strong that nothing - not even light - can escape.

If some of physicists' favourite theories about extra dimensions are correct, it would also be possible for high-energy cosmic-ray particles from space to create black holes when they collide with molecules in the Earth's atmosphere (New Scientist, 29 September 2001, p 30). These black holes would be invisibly small, with a mass of only 10 micrograms or so. And they would be so unstable that they would explode in a burst of particles within around a billion-billion-billionth of a second. ...

To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.

To continue reading this article, log in or subscribe to New Scientist